Guest post written by Acts of Cupidity author E. S. Drake
E. S. Drake grew up in Bedford, a natural daydreamer as a child, penning poetry by moonlight and escaping into her imagination. She later moved to Bodmin Moor to dwell among the wild things, exploring different genres of writing while building a business teaching archery and survival skills. The darker aspects of her past have been her main motivation for creating flawed and complex characters to encapsulate the pitfalls of humanity, attempting to navigate our vulnerability with humour and compassion.
About Acts of Cupidity: This charming urban fantasy is what you’d have if Terry Pratchett wrote The Good Place, following two agents of love ensnared in a plot to bring down the natural order of the world.
Write what you know… That was always the advice I saw floating around online for new authors. Once I’d put down the high fantasy trilogy I’d been working on for nine years, I decided to take that advice, hoping to leave some sort of legacy where readers would be able to just know who I was through the pages. The problem was, I had so many things I wanted to include.
So I started with the bits that interested me most. The afterlife, what would I want it to be like? How does destiny work, and is there a greater purpose for us mere mortals? I didn’t stop there, this book had to reflect my daft sense of humour, my passions, my darkest moments, the pieces of my heart that I couldn’t share out loud.
Acts of Cupidity was born from this blend of the heartfelt and the bizarre, with humble beginnings as a humorous conversation in the office at my local police station (with a colleague, I hadn’t been arrested) around the topic of who controlled fate.
It follows two London based agents of fate, both employed by the Apollo Division, responsible for matchmaking mortals to ensure that their intertwined destinies kept them on the right path, Cupids, if you will, but without the dodgy traditional attire. These agents, Erron Grover and Casey Hart, represented both my traumatic early life and my ongoing optimism, two very different sides of a coin I can never part with.
The story follows the sudden upheaval of their laid-back, jazz-loving, chess-playing lives when their matchmaking assignments start going horribly wrong, resulting in a series of unexplained deaths.
With destiny off the rails, the realm of Chaos starts to seep into the mortal world, creating a series of bizarre, hilarious and downright terrifying plagues on humanity, ranging from rubber duck storms, severe earthquakes and a horde of marauding geese, rippling through the city and across the globe at an alarming rate.
Erron and Casey, with help from their newest recruit, Nikita Wolf, find themselves in a race against time to reverse the apocalypse and clear their names from suspicion. With wrongful accusations, betrayal and murder in the mix, Erron and Casey’s afterlife-long friendship is tested to the limits, as everything they knew and loved is threatened by this chaotic reality. It does, however, prove just how much they have to lose, stirring up a new-found urgency to speak their true feelings, before all hope is lost.
I’ve had more than enough people liken my humour to Terry Pratchett, a huge compliment that I’ve yet to earn, though I can comfortably say I am most amused by his work, and other silly gems such as Monty Python and Leslie Nielsen’s The Naked Gun. That’s not to say I can’t enjoy a clever joke or two, but if it’s silly and harmless, it usually gets my vote.
Acts of Cupidity draws influence as well from some of my favourite elements of pop culture, starting with the show Dead Like Me, which was cancelled far too early, and if I could wish for any kind of afterlife, it would be getting post it notes in Der Waffle Haus for reaps of the day. Second to this, there would be The Good Place, with Ted Danson delivering a deadpan and naïve style of humour in the very chaotic setting of the show. Throw in a dash of London grit, a few cocktails and more than enough geese, and you’ve got Acts of Cupidity. I can’t pass by the ultimate nod to my favourite film franchise ever, the Terminator (1&2, the rest don’t exist to me!) with the phrase ‘There is no fate but what we make for ourselves’ which has stuck with me for years, as I still haven’t decided if things are written in the stars for us, or if we have complete control. Either way, I haven’t yet had a killer robot from the future turn up to stop me writing this book. So it can’t be all that bad…
It’s no secret that death has always scared me, the concept of just not existing anymore being the forefront of my mind on many a dark night. To go to a fantastical and heavenly place might be wonderful, but my dream would be to stick around, watching from the sidelines, taking up assignments to watch other people’s lives grow and flourish. I’ve been a ghost most of my life, shrinking my awkward self to fit in around others, carrying the weight of decades of CPTSD, not knowing if I am wanted or where I belong. But creating the Afterlife Agency, I made my own world where I would have purpose, a found family, a sense of belonging that I’ve yet to find this side of mortality.
As for the agents of Apollo Division, I wanted to shake up the old-fashioned notion of the Hallmark cherubim Cupid, give them plenty of life experience as mortals before they joined their new roles in the afterlife, and more importantly, some decent archery kit. The sentiment carried through to the other divisions, and I spent a long time figuring out exactly what elements of destiny would be fun (and realistic) to portray, finally settling on luck, death and vengeance, each of them having their own distinct wings and ways to carry out their assignments. I know the mythology is shaky, because it’s meant to be, it’s explained in the book as to why. I’m not out here trying to show up as a history buff, but I do love all things mythical and wanted to give them a little spotlight amongst the madness, so consider this my attempt to manage expectations on the mythology side of things.
My dream is one day, that I will go to a comic con and see my characters being cosplayed, so I can stop and chat to fans of the series, whilst also being dressed as something weird and wonderful as usual, because being immersed in the comic con culture is the closest I have felt to belonging all my life. I long to create my own found family of readers, and hope that Acts of Cupidity becomes the first beacon lit in summoning the misfits, the outcasts, the quirky and the lost into a new fandom filled with heart, soul and a lot of chaotic geese.
